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Loneliness damages the brain

19.11.2018

It is known that prolonged loneliness has a bad effect on the psyche: anxiety worsens in a person, depression develops (which can lead to psychosis), memory and other cognitive skills deteriorate. It would be quite logical to assume that such strong changes in the psyche are accompanied by changes in the neural circuits of the brain.

To find out what happens in a lonely brain, researchers from Thomas Jefferson University and the University of Pittsburgh first raised lab mice in large shared cages where they could communicate with each other, play with toys together, run through mazes, etc., and then, when rodents became adults, they were transplanted into single cages. A month later, according to a report at the annual conference of the Neuroscience Society, neurons in mice decreased in volume - by an average of 20% - and remained in this form for another three months, while the mice were kept separately from each other.

On the other hand, during a month of solitary confinement on neurons, there were more so-called dendritic spines - special protrusions on the cell membrane, where the neural process-dendrite is ready to form a connection-synapse with another neuron. Usually, an increase in dendritic spines is a positive sign: it means that the brain is adapting to new information and is ready to build new neural circuits. However, in this case, the increase in the number of spines should apparently be understood in the sense that the brain tries to maintain the status quo in the absence of social stimuli.

However, after a month of loneliness in mouse neurons, the number of spines dropped. What's more, the levels of a protein called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, were reduced in the brain. This protein stimulates the growth of neurons, which means that since there is less of it, conductive processes grow poorly in neurons alone, therefore, there are fewer opportunities for the emergence of new neural circuits. Finally, compared to the mice that still lived in company, the solitary mice had more damage to the DNA of nerve cells.

In the future, the authors of the work want to test how all these changes affect behavior. Again, we once wrote that social isolation stimulates the activity of a gene in mice that increases aggressiveness and anxiety, but here we need more details linking shades of behavior with changes in neurons. In addition, neuronal contraction has only been observed in the sensory cortex, which processes signals from the sense organs, and in the motor cortex, which controls movement, and it would be interesting to see what happens in other areas of the brain. Finally, further experiments may give us some therapeutic agent with which to treat the brain damaged by loneliness.

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